The present invention relates to the concept of winding skeins of yarn in accurate weight quantities. In the past it has been the practice to wind yarn in skein form for eventual packaging and use as in hand knitting yarn by measuring the length of yarn wound on the skein. Davidson U.S. Pat. No. 3,693,897 is a disclosure of such skein winding apparatus. As can be appreciated, yarn varies in density so that its density in unit length is not uniform and accordingly it becomes a trial and error proposition to ascertain for any given cone of knitting yarn the length that is necessary to produce a package of, let us say, 4 oz. As a result of these shortcomings in winders used in the past, yarn packagers have effectively provided more yarn per package than the weight indicated thereon so that Government consumer inspectors would not penalize the distributor for an underweight package. Some prior attempts have been made in which weighing apparatus has been used as, for example, in the West U.S. Pat. No. 1,143,003 and in a Girard U.S. Pat. No. 3,785,582. In each of these prior art attempts, however, weights are used as a restoring force on the beam balance and must be manually removed from the beam balance for even wind. This is not desirable in automated skein winding machines.